"A Committee of Correspondence"

05 July 2016

"Comey’s full remarks ... " Washpost

"From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent." Comey

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What I heard was that Comey said that although Clinton and her staff broke the law in mishandling government secrets, there was not enough evidence of specific intent to recommend prosecution in a criminal case or cases.

He also said that given the unsecured nature of the Hillarygate system there was no reason to think that the system could not have been penetrated by just about anyone with a modicum of knowledge.

Soo, HC will be the Democratic Party candidate.

Just to be clear, when she is president/CinC she will have unlimited access to ALL the secrets of the United States. She will have that by virtue of her constitutional office.

IMO the GOP should start thinking of a convention revolt to find a candidate who can hold the senate against Hillary control of judicial appointments. Forget the White House, think of the senate. think! pl

Comments

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Dear Colonel,

I would beg to disagree. The Trumpian "masses" that I know, some of whom are family members, would make Cincinnati look like Chicago 1968 if the elites try to steal the nomination. I was surprised today that Mika and Joe gave HRC such a beating and they even jumped all over the miserable Rattner who tried to make the case that at least HRC wasn't indicted. I would wager that you would see the GOP begin to coalesce around the nominee, but then DT will have to abandon his usual self-destructive campaign tactics and step aside while the media makes his case for him.

That may be true, and if so there will hopefully be a formal written report that contains the information you mentioned. But the head of the investigation certainly has more facts about the issue than people calling for treason trials.

With a de- & re-constitution to an Olde Worlde system of dispensations, indulgences, perquisites, privileges, and edicts/decrees/ukases, this latest launch of the New World Order® product line has a decided retro feel ....

Nancy K - Re: London and bread alone. You ask: What will London do without the rest of England? Are you serious? What will London do without food, water, and breathable air? England would do fine without London. The opposite would not be the case. Norfolkshire grows the potatoes, not Notting Hill. Where do San Franciscans, New Yorkers, and Bostonians think their water comes from (Hetch Hetchy, the Catskills, the Quabbin, respectively)? Do they think there's an app for that? Or do they realize they are colonizing an entire landscape and its people in order to get the essentials of life from it, often at deep cost to those who came before?

Yes, I think it was, probably unintentionally, condescending to rural or non-metropolitan urban people (e.g., New Bedford, Mass. -- a city, but not metropolitan.) More importantly, the statement's just wrong on the facts about the actual material basis of the metro/non-metropolitan divide, e.g., cities rely far more on the countryside for material needs than vice versa. Non-urban human societies precede urban ones by many tens of thousands of years. Urbanity grew out of them, not the other way around. I note also all your examples of rural areas tend to be poor and in the upland or deep South. I have no problem with those areas, quite the contrary, but it shows a certain set of blinders in your analysis. For that is just one subset of rural America. But there's a whole panoply of rural areas in this country that you neglect, some quite prosperous and well outside major metro areas, e.g., the Traverse City area in northern lower Michigan, the valley of Vermont, and others, that will do fine on their own. Finally, and above all, this pure economic utilitarianism may not matter much compared to self-determination: as both Brexit and Tom Paine have shown, cost-benefit analyses tend not come up with a proper valuation of "so celestial an item as Freedom."

In short, I do hope you realize that those hip financialized metro areas are epiphenomena on the surface of larger human and ecological realities that could give a damn about the current political landscape in terms of TeamBlue and TeamRed. This reminds me of a Californian smugly asking recently what we would do without all their avocados and lettuce-in-the-dead-of-winter? Well, in places like Plymouth, or Virginia, or Michigan or Iowa, they'll do what they've done since the last Ice Age: survive and prosper. We'll do just fine. What will California do without all that water provided by 20th century federal mass-engineering projects (read: continental scale water-theft)? The divorce of so many in this country from actual material conditions, the farming and fishing, the woods and waters, let alone the people who farm and fish and generally tend to the natural world that sustains all of our tottering civilization, is in no small part a symptom, or perhaps even a cause, of the current crisis. If having most of our people live in suburbs or metro bubbles means they have forgotten the hewing of the wood and the drawing of the water, we are in deep trouble indeed.

But, because life is short, I'm going to go weed the squash plants and maybe fish one of the kettle ponds on our first 90+ day here, as those who came before me have for many centuries on hot summer days.

Fred, Yes. That is true. Some states are very much aligned to the same vision that the Federal Govt has. With states people can still vote with their feet. No possible when it comes from the federal level, unless one wishes to become an expat.

I'd also just add that much of that missive above was less directed at you personally, Nancy K, than a lot of folks I deal with who put forth arguments quite similar to the ones you made above. So it's nothing personal, but yes, those arguments do get me exercised. Still, I wish you well.